Puzzle Ptuesday: How Time Flies!
Current Voting:
Anne Tagonist
Current Submissions:
Chews Your Own Adventure!
Current Brainstorms:
Laz0r Frogz - The Next Generation
Movemeber Madness!
You know what they say: “Time flies when you’re having fun…” or working so hard you can’t stop to think! This past week really has been a whirlwind! It feels like just yesterday when we were writing our last Ptuesday update, so I’ll try my best to get you guys caught up!
Let’s see, what has happened…
We released Episode 3: May The Horse Be With You! with special guest Anthony Daniels (some of you might remember him as C-3P0 from Stars Wars®). This is our spo0o0okiest episode to date so make sure to check it out and let us know what you think!
To celebrate the release of this episode, we are hosting a sweepstakes for the chance to win one of ten signed C-3P0 figurines! For more information on the sweepstakes, click here!
We barely had time to breathe a sigh of relief that Episode 3 was complete because we were all already knee-deep in Episode 4 production. We’re trying to keep things short this time around, since we felt that our last episode really pushed the upper limits of what we can accomplish in our short production timeline. Our goal was to keep the animated segment under 3 minutes and keep the art/animation assets to a minimum (giving Chez and Brittany a chance to catch up). For the most part, we’re doing really well! Brittany is pretty much all done with episode art and has now moved on to game art, which keeps us right on schedule! Chez has finished with the blocking in record time and right now the episode clocks in at about 2:10 min! Wowzah! Today he worked on some special effects for the time bubble that Jasper and Cornelius find themselves stuck in. Check it out! (Click to watch the animation)
All in all, the animated part of the episode is really shaping up and we’re hoping to have final animation done around the end of the week!
Some of the bigger complications we are facing this time around is with the game. To refresh your memory, here’s the winning game idea for this episode:
When their respective keys are held down, [J]asper and [C]ornelius hold onto a time-machine object while looped backdrops in time phase in and out. Play twister with your fingers to hold onto strandees like [Z]ed and [P]am, chaining up the monkeys or scientists to bring them back to the present day.
We came up with a game design based on this idea that, in retrospect, was probably too complicated and ended up veering away from the original submission. After some really good conversations that came up on the forums we decided to rethink the way we were approaching this game. We decided to modify the game so it more closely resembled the original game idea, while still incorporating the community submitted content that we had collected for the game.
This situation brought up the bigger issue of our game development process. Are we cutting it too close? Should we be expanding our time line to create games? Unfortunately, with our current production cycle, we don’t have a lot of time to prototype and test our designs before they need to go into full on development and art/audio integration. We’ll be having a meeting later this week to discuss our current cycle and see how we can make it better and how we can get YOU more involved throughout the whole process!
Stay tuned PCH fans and as always thank you for your feedback and your patience as we work out the kinks and try to make this the best experience we can!
Phew…and now time for dinner… :)